Classic British Flight Sim

Just for the heck of it, I was using Traffic View Board at EGCC to watch the AI traffic and noticed some strange things going on. Tried another airport and the same thing. Times listed on Traffic View board contained a lot of inaccuracies. Flights arrived that were not listed and the same for departures. Then I decompiled one of my traffic file with AI FLight Planner and got numerous errors. I also noticed that all my traffic files, except one or two that I recently added had the same date - 3 April and almost the same time around 0:59 AM. That was a almost a month after the switch in the US to summer time, but I didn't think FS adjusted any times in traffic files for that. Am I right?

I have spent most of the day corrrecting the errors which generally were of the nature that the arrival time of a leg was very close or identical to the departure time of the next leg. Fortunatly I had some backups, but not every file. I don't know if the DST switch had anything to do with corrupting the .bgl files but I am very suspicious of the same date on most of those file because they were installed at different times. Has anyone else found this problem?

Hi Mate,

if the BGL file was corrupted either FS would crash or you would get an error message saying it couldn't open the file. It couldn't actually change the contents of the file. There are AI traffic limitations, so even if you have a number of flights defined into and out off an airport, various factors can cause strange behavior like this. FS WILL control the number and times of flights into airports based on available parking and the times between flights arriving and departing etc.

Thanks Ben!

Yes, I should not have used the word "corrupted" because those files would all decompile, with both Traffic Tools and AI Flight Planner. When I looked at the files, the format looked fine. The errors reported by AI FLight Planner were nearly all of the nature of a leg departing before or the same time as the prior leg. There were one of two others such as a flight with an "F" indicator but no flight number entry.

I knew the FS AI did some adjusting but since you say it does not write to the Traffic bgl files, I am ruling that out as the source of the problem. I used a different flight planner in the past and perhaps that was the cause. As for the files dates all being the same, bar one or two I had recently added, I now think I could have run the disk cleanup utility or something similar that caused that.

Anyway I am all sorted now.

Nigel²